SPDY in Nginx

One of the cornerstones of Automattic’s web-scale infrastructure is a project out of Russia we started using in 2008 called Nginx. Don’t let the sparse website fool you, Nginx (pronounced engine-ex) has been taking high-end websites by storm, and is used on 24% of the top thousand websites (a good chunk of them WordPress). I was very proud of our team helping sponsor and debug SPDY support in the latest release. Hopefully this accelerates the adoption of technology like SPDY that improves the user experience of the web.

I am a huge fan of Nginx. Configuration is simple and performance is actually blazing fast compared to Apache in my experience. On top of this it’s memory usage is super low allowing me to use it easily on 256mb cloud instances. Recently set up a WordPress blog on it and performance is great.

I moved one of my servers from Apache to Nginx a few months ago. I still need to finish writing my blog post with my notes about it. And I definitely need to pull the trigger on switching my other server over. The next big improvement I’m looking forward to in Nginx is native support for websockets.

nginx really does need htaccess support. It is a bad dream to have to reconfigure a server for each website. In a shared hosting setup it is lacking. But also the need to reconfigure it, just got each change on a single site is also a problem.

That’s great news, i’ll try it out ASAP.SPDY is something i’ve been keeping an eye on.
I’ve been running Nginx for a year or so now, it’s so much simpler and faster than Apache which i had used for many years previously.
All your teams hard work is very much appreciated 🙂

If you have lots of traffic, it’s worth it. The bigger hosts are slow to change because they have tons of recurring income tied to Apache. I serve millions of pageviews per month with NginX and I’m happy I tried something new. If you look in “top” you can see NginX executes in less than 1 hundredth of a second, like it’s not even there. Maybe the real advantage is low memory footprint. The memory you save can be put to good use, like caching your database. The Russian documentation translation is much better now. If you have the time, go for it!

I’m using NginX for all my WordPress blogs and my clients’ WordPress blogs since March 2010. And look at the trend, it’s the fastest growing web server. Matt was way ahead in 2008, maybe out of necessity.